Pursey Heugens, from Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, will present "I Hold on": How Country Music Songwriters Cope with the Precarity of Craft Work

Abstract: Careers in the creative crafts are precarious: workers face constant rejection and the pay they receive is always erratic and often low. Yet some creative craft workers handle these challenges better than others, precarity sometimes subsides as careers progress, and the core-periphery structure that typifies creative craft production systems is navigable. This raises the question of how some creative craft workers cope productively with the precarity of craft work. We study a prominent creative craft workers’ collective: country music songwriters. Our study captures the voices of 90 creative craft workers, drawing on secondary interviews with 66 songwriters operating at the core of the highly ‘corporatized’ country music production system and 24 residing at its social and spatial periphery. We find that the key to coping with precarity lies in achieving supportive patterns of social embeddedness by investing in primary craft skills, advancing higher-order vocational skills, and navigating the core-periphery structure of the creative craft production system. As apprentice songwriters practice their craft and learn how to organize their songwriting routines, they become increasingly vested in the system. Once they become master songwriters, they broaden their networks by liaising more with other industry stakeholders and engaging with the system more reflexively to ensure their continued relevance. Peripheral workers engage in ‘allyship’ by developing ties with workers positioned at the system’s core. We incorporate these elements in a grounded theoretical model capturing how songwriters cope with precarity.